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Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking Paperback – February 13, 2007

by Joan Didion (Author)

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Print length

227 pages
Language

English
Publication date

February 13, 2007
Dimensions

5.14 x 0.62 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1400078431
ISBN-13

978-1400078431
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From the Publisher


	Let Me Tell You What I Mean	South and West	Blue Nights	The Year of Magical Thinking	We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live	The Last Thing He Wanted
	From one of our most iconic and influential writers: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt.	Here are two extended excerpts from notebooks Joan Didion kept in the 1970s; read together, they form a piercing view of the American political and cultural landscape.	"A New York Times Notable Book and National Bestseller From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter."	A stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.	Includes seven books in one volume: the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From.	An incisive and chilling look at a modern world where things are not working as they should—and where the oblique and official language is as sinister as the events it is covering up.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Thrilling . . . a living, sharp, and memorable book. . . . An exact, candid, and penetrating account of personal terror and bereavement . . . sometimes quite funny because it dares to tell the truth.”
—Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning candor and piercing details. . . . An indelible portrait of loss and grief.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“I can’t think of a book we need more than hers. . . . I can’t imagine dying without this book.”
—John Leonard, New York Review of Books

“Achingly beautiful. . . . We have come to admire and love Didion for her preternatural poise, unrivaled eye for absurdity, and Orwellian distaste for cant. It is thus a difficult, moving, and extraordinarily poignant experience to watch her direct such scrutiny inward.”
—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times

“An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief. . . . It also skips backward in time [to] call up a shimmering portrait of her unique marriage. . . . To make her grief real, Didion shows us what she has lost.”
—Lev Grossman, Time

About the Author

JOAN DIDION is the author of five novels, ten books of nonfiction, and a play. Her book The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005. She lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1 1.Life changes fast.Life changes in the instant.You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.The question of self-pity.Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.,” but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.For a long time I wrote nothing else.Life changes in the instant.The ordinary instant.At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. “He was on his way home from work—happy, successful, healthy—and then, gone,” I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an “ordinary Sunday morning” it had been. “It was just an ordinary beautiful September day,” people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: “Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.”“And then—gone.” In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think my) otherwise empty house even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me.Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no version I heard included the details I could not yet face, for example the blood on the living room floor that stayed there until José came in the next morning and cleaned it up.José. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying to Las Vegas later that day, December 31, but never went. José was crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood. When I first told him what had happened he had not understood. Clearly I was not the ideal teller of this story, something about my version had been at once too offhand and too elliptical, something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the same failure later when I had to tell Quintana), but by the time José saw the blood he understood.I had picked up the abandoned syringes and ECG electrodes before he came in that morning but I could not face the blood.In outline.It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue (it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as “Beth Israel North” or “the old Doctors’ Hospital,” where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. 2.December 30, 2003, a Tuesday.We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North.We had come home.We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat.The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.John was talking, then he wasn’t.At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking he had asked me if I had used single-malt Scotch for his second drink. I had said no, I used the same Scotch I had used for his first drink. “Good,” he had said. “I don’t know why but I don’t think you should mix them.” At another point in those seconds or that minute he had been talking about why World War One was the critical event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed.I have no idea which subject we were on, the Scotch or World War One, at the instant he stopped talking.I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable.I remember saying Don’t do that.When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I remember trying to lift him far enough from the back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the sense of his weight as he fell forward, first against the table, then to the floor. In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the New York–Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not taped the numbers by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.Someone else.I called one of the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said Just come. When the paramedics came I tried to tell them what had happened but before I could finish they had transformed the part of the living room where John lay into an emergency department. One of them (there were three, maybe four, even an hour later I could not have said) was talking to the hospital about the electrocardiogram they seemed already to be transmitting. Another was opening the first or second of what would be many syringes for injection. (Epinephrine? Lidocaine? Procainamide? The names came to mind but I had no idea from where.) I remember saying that he might have choked. This was dismissed with a finger swipe: the airway was clear. They seemed now to be using defibrillating paddles, an attempt to restore a rhythm. They got something that could have been a normal heartbeat (or I thought they did, we had all been silent, there was a sharp jump), then lost it, and started again.“He’s still fibbing,” I remember the one on the telephone saying.“V-fibbing,” John’s cardiologist said the next morning when he called from Nantucket. “They would have said ‘V-fibbing.’ V for ventricular.”Maybe they said “V-fibbing” and maybe they did not. Atrial fibrillation did not immediately or necessarily cause cardiac arrest. Ventricular did. Maybe ventricular was the given.I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen next. Since there was an ambulance crew in the living room, the next logical step would be going to the hospital. It occurred to me that the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I would not be ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take. I would waste time, get left behind. I found my handbag and a set of keys and a summary John’s doctor had made of his medical history. When I got back to the living room the paramedics were watching the computer monitor they had set up on the floor. I could not see the monitor so I watched their faces. I remember one glancing at the others. When the decision was made to move it happened very fast. I followed them to the elevator and asked if I could go with them. They said they were taking the gurney down first, I could go in the second ambulance. One of them waited with me for the elevator to come back up. By the time he and I got into the second ambulance the ambulance carrying the gurney was pulling away from the front of the building. The distance from our building to the part of New York–Presbyterian that used to be New York Hospital is six crosstown blocks. I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gurney was already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the driveway. Everyone else in sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. “Is this the wife,” he said to the driver, then turned to me. “I’m your social worker,” he said, and I guess that is when I must have known.I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew.” This was what the mother of a nineteen-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said on an HBO documentary quoted by Bob Herbert in The New York Times on the morning of November 12, 2004. “But I thought that if, as long as I didn’t let him in, he couldn’t tell me. And then it—none of that would’ve happened. So he kept saying, ‘Ma’am, I need to come in.’ And I kept telling him, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.’ ”When I read this at breakfast almost eleven months after the night with the ambulance and the social worker I recognized the thinking as my own.Inside the emergency room I could see the gurney being pushed into a cubicle, propelled by more people in scrubs. Someone told me to wait in the reception area. I did. There was a line for admittance paperwork. Waiting in the line seemed the constructive thing to do. Waiting in the line said that there was still time to deal with this, I had copies of the insurance cards in my handbag, this was not a hospital I had ever negotiated—New York Hospital was the Cornell part of New York–Presbyterian, the part I knew was the Columbia part, Columbia-Presbyterian, at 168th and Broadway, twenty minutes away at best, too far in this kind of emergency—but I could make this unfamiliar hospital work, I could be useful, I could arrange the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian once he was stabilized. I was fixed on the details of this imminent transfer to Columbia (he would need a bed with telemetry, eventually I could also get Quintana transferred to Columbia, the night she was admitted to Beth Israel North I had written on a card the beeper numbers of several Columbia doctors, one or another of them could make all this happen) when the social worker reappeared and guided me from the paperwork line into an empty room off the reception area. “You can wait here,” he said. I waited. The room was cold, or I was. I wondered how much time had passed between the time I called the ambulance and the arrival of the paramedics. It had seemed no time at all (a mote in the eye of God was the phrase that came to me in the room off the reception area) but it must have been at the minimum several minutes.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Reprint edition (February 13, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 227 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400078431
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400078431
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.5 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.14 x 0.62 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Pet Loss Grief
- #12 in Author Biographies
- #35 in Love & Loss

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Joan Didion

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Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction. Joan Didion's Where I Was From, Political Fictions, The Last Thing He Wanted, After Henry, Miami, Democracy, Salvador, A Book of Common Prayer, and Run River are available in Vintage paperback.

Photo by David Shankbone (David Shankbone) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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KayDee

If you're not rich and beloved, move on to the next book.

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2020

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This was recommended to me as a book that a friend had given others in times of grief. Reading it, I was horrified. If your grieving friend is wealthy and surrounded by caretakers of all kinds, by all means, give them this book. If they're ordinary folks expected to go back to work after 3 days of bereavement leave, do not, under any circumstances, give them this book. I'd never read anything by Joan Didion prior, so if you're a long time fan of her writing you might disagree. She certainly went through losses that would make anyone stagger. I just found that I couldn't identify with her experiences. She describes months of folks making sure she was taken care of. Can't relate. She recounts good times in a long marriage that involves luxurious travels and freedom gained through wealth. Can't relate. Am I jealous? Probably. I have to say that I feel like this book could have been one amazing essay, instead of a book length piece of rumination. Maybe she published it because she figured that as a widow she needed riches upon riches? Valid, but ridiculous. Everyone has bouts of narcissistic navel gazing, it's just unfortunate that this one was published with much acclaim.

I donated this to a local book swap, but made a note on it to the next reader that if you're recently bereaved and struggling, this is the absolute last book you should read for comfort, unless you are as well off as Didion.

197 people found this helpful

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Dby

Poignant, a little painful, totally real

Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2017

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My husband died 02/20/2017. A friend recommended this book. It touched my heart - and hit a few nerves - as I shared this tale of confusion and pain. But in this reading, I gained insight into myself and my own unique grief. I learned that each of us have experiences that are similar and also totally different. I found myself recognizing many of my feelings in Ms. Didion’s book. Some of it was painful, but it was also freeing. I know that I will not magically “get back to normal”. I know that my life will never be the same - that I will never be the same person I was before. This wonderful book gave me hope and courage. I can forge a future for myself and still carry my memories with me. A wonderfully engaging book. A Godsend for me, personally.

203 people found this helpful

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AKS

Read this if you're dealing with the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one. Or buy it for someone who is. Trust me.

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2018

Verified Purchase

I read this book after my healthy 67-years-old mother died unexpectedly from a massive brain bleed. She was visiting me, we were talking and sitting on my couch, and she just fell over. It still feels like a nightmare, and it's been been almost three months. Anyway, there are a lot of books out there to help with grief. You can find all kinds of self-help types of books on this topic, some written for adult children, some for surviving spouses. Mostly I didn't find them very helpful---neither did my dad. In addition to grief counseling, I would recommend this book highly to anyone dealing with a sudden death of a loved one.

Didion's memoir helped me so much---her descriptions of her emotional trauma, and how she lived in the aftermath were spot-on and very similar to my own experience. I am usually very focused, detail-oriented; my memory is sharp. But since my mom died, I've been forgetful, unfocused, unmotivated. I felt like I was losing my mind. And I just kept thinking that if I could make it through the funeral, that would be the worst part. As Didion explains, that is NOT the worst part, or the hardest part---the worst and hardest things come later. Didion writes a lot about her own similar problems when grieving, and it was so good to know that it's not just me, and that it will get better. I bought a copy for my dad, too, and he devoured it and also found it very helpful---in fact he's mentioned several times how valuable this book has been to him. I know it's a memoir and not really a manual, but somehow, it has been something of a guidebook for us. I bought it on Kindle for me and a hardcover for Dad; I'm going to buy an extra copy to keep, just to have on hand in case a friend could one day benefit from it, too.

Read this book if you are dealing with a sudden, unexpected death of a loved one. Or, give it to someone else who is enduring something similar. You won't regret it.

178 people found this helpful

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Joseph Sciuto

As someone who believes that "honesty" is the one essential quality every piece of great writing has in common

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2018

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Joan Didion's "The Year Of Magical Thinking" is a brutally honest recounting of the grief Mrs. Didion felt after losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne, after forty years of marriage. As someone who believes that "honesty" is the one essential quality every piece of great writing has in common, well then Mrs. Didion has hit the ball out of the park. Her writing is not only honest, but enthralling, and compelling. Yet, this is not the type of book I would recommend to everyone. For people dealing with grief or have experienced great grief one can easily relate and find a certain amount of comfort in the author's experiences, yet if one is in a happy mood or chronically depressed I would not recommend this book. It is a heart wrenching story and sometimes it is better not to disturb one's peace of mind.

94 people found this helpful

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Perfect Pillow

Such Good Medicine

Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2018

Verified Purchase

The Netflix documentary 'The Center Will Not Hold' inspired me to read 'The Year of Magical Thinking'. Such good medicine for a grieving heart. I'd bottled up much of that grief after having lost two very special loved ones to cancer and the dissolution of my marriage all within a period of two years. The documentary cracked my heart open again; the book encouraged me to start the healing process.

"I know why we try to keep the dead alive," Didion writes. "We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water."

93 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

wombat

Didion is a self-centered narcissist

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2018

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The Year of Magical Thinking documents the process of grieving that Didion went through in the year after her husband's death, and has been widely acclaimed for its detached, stylised writing. A case of the emperor's new clothes? To my mind her voice is cold, dishonest and vague: there is no heart to this book. Given the subject matter, I find this particularly chilling. She intellectualises her grief for her husband to the extent of removing all emotion. There is no sense of who her husband was – just an awful lot about Didion herself, a clinical recitation of all the literature on grief she’s read, and endless throwaway remarks about her privileged status in Malibu and New York. Then there's the subplot of The Year of Magical Thinking, which is a devastating one: her daughter, Quintana, is gravely ill in hospital while Didion herself is trying to come to terms with her husband's death (Quintana will in fact die the following summer, after Didion had drafted her manuscript but before the book was published). But not once does Didion express any love or warmth for her sickening daughter. Maybe this is why I struggled with this book and am judging her so harshly. In a recent documentary on Netflix (The Centre Will Not Hold), the closest Didion can come to saying something even remotely affectionate about her daughter is "her humour worked for me". Other than that, it's all about Didion. One review of Blue Nights, the book she wrote after The Year of Magical Thinking, about her daughter's death, puts it this way: "What is perhaps most odd about this work is how little we ultimately learn about Quintana, who remains in the background and sometimes fades entirely from view." It’s hard to feel any empathy for someone so resolutely focused on herself amid such sadness and tragedy.

62 people found this helpful

aarnald amundssen

SELF-CENTRED NARCISSISM ASIDE ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

I couldn't get into this until, one day, i had nothing else to read and so,carried on reading. It took time but I started to come alongside her detachment and obsession. Towards the end I found myself in tears and tried to read something out to my wife but stopped, blubbing. My own heart attack experience was explained beautifully. A small quote - along the lines of - "the clear blue sky from which the plane fell", was so perfectly descriptive of how arbitrary life can seem. What do you recommend I read next?

17 people found this helpful

Rose Lois Presley

it’s not your conventional love story, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ is the ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 21, 2016

Verified Purchase

Granted, it’s not your conventional love story, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ is the story of a marriage that ends abruptly, suddenly. Didion writes from the realist perspective, practical, abstract, cold almost. Her husband of 40 years, mid-scotch, dies at the dinner table in their apartment of a heart attack. “She’s a pretty cool customer” notes a hospital observer. Loss is a fearful subject, it’s a frontier nobody ever expects to cross and it’s a subject that nobody ever really talks about. People change the subject, if you lose your partner nobody asks how you cope with the empty side of the bed and what happens at the end of the day when all you want to do is curl up in the conversation of your partner, your best friend. Didion explores the magical thinking that takes over- signs, meanings, messages, whether her husband knew intuitively what would happen as she traces and traverses backwards and forwards across the landscape of their relationship and marriage, his death.

26 people found this helpful

Erasmus

I don't know what to make of this

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2018

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I haven't read much Joan Didion so have no markers to steer by, but this book was rubbish and fabulous, repetitive and singular, funny and heartbreaking in equal measure, all the way through. The single word I think I'd use to describe it is 'Lonesome'. Because it is. I admired her fortitude as well as weakness, her grief as well as her (few) joys, and I can only think it was written as both a cathartic and a learning experience.

Despite these weasel words, read it anyway.

12 people found this helpful

Crusty

Disappointing.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 19, 2020

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Disappointing. Put it aside two thirds of the way through as I did not find it insightful at all. Not sure who this book is intended for as recently bereaved persons are unlikely to find solace or guidance in it as it’s more or less just a journal. Although it might be of interest to casual readers, who may not have experienced recent grief themselves, I would not recommend it even if they are interested in the subject matter as it’s very two dimensional.

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